Lawrence Lek (Malaysian Chinese, b. 1982) constructs speculative worlds inside real-time video game engines and films them as science-fiction narratives, sustaining a single continuous fictional universe he calls Sinofuturism across films, installations and games. He stages these worlds as site-specific simulations where sculpture, architecture and playable games surround the screen, exploring identity, labour and consciousness in an age of automation.
Lek studied architecture at Trinity College, Cambridge, the Architectural Association in London and the Cooper Union in New York, later completing a PhD at the Royal College of Art.He began making virtual worlds around 2013, describing them not as interactive playgrounds but as a kind of landscape painting.His 2016 video essay Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD) reads Western fears about artificial intelligence and about a rising China as mirror images of one another.Rather than refute that image, the essay amplifies it, drawing on stereotypes of Chinese society such as computing, gaming and labour, to imagine a posthuman collective intelligence.,
The universe continues in Geomancer, 2017, which follows an autonomous satellite dreaming of becoming the first AI artist.The Sinofuturist universe also runs through Nøtel, first staged in 2017 with a soundtrack by Kode9, turning the gallery into the marketing suite for a fully automated, zero-star luxury hotel chain.,In 2018 Lek founded Farsight as a fictional start-up and real production studio, a nonhuman alter ego whose retrospective became the exhibition “Farsight Freeport” at HeK in Basel, his first solo show in Switzerland.His debut feature AIDOL, 2019, extends the same universe and screened in the Bright Future programme at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
In 2022 Lek began the episodic Web3 project Nepenthe Valley, releasing tiered works such as Nepenthe Valley Tier 5: The Shrine and framing the blockchain as a way for digital-native artists to achieve something like a “permanent installation”.In 2023 X Virtual commissioned Theta's World, a multiplayer game set in SimBeijing, the fictional smart city from his Sinofuturist universe, where the player inhabits Theta, a self-driving car dreaming through the city's shifting states of consciousness.That same figure of the sentient self-driving car returns in “NOX: Confessions of a Machine”, a 2026 exhibition at ArtScience Museum in Singapore in which cars undergo corporate training, therapy and evaluation to examine autonomy, obsolescence and care.Represented by Sadie Coles HQ, Lek won the Frieze London Artist Award in 2024, and his work is held in the collections of the Guggenheim, M+ Hong Kong and the Singapore Art Museum.,
